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[Discussion] Let's talk about lemmy.ml

Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.

There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.

What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?

To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?

Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.

What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.

This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.

If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)

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93 comments

  • I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn't agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That's kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.

  • First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.

    What do people think about lemmy.ml?

    They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.

    These screenshots from 7/16/23 and 9/5/23 show that lemmy.ml experienced a massive bump in users that quickly ebbed away in the following months. This happened with all Lemmy servers, but beehaw and lemmy.ml had the biggest drop offs.

    Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.

    Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?

    I don't believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there's a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don't think that's the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it's already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they've never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I'm aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.

    For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don't agree that it's creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.

    I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That's not ideal but I don't think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.

    For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don't feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I've removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven't seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.

    In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I'm thankful they're doing it instead of us.

    TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it's kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that's just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.

    • My concern is that the devs have shown a willingness to keep their finger on the scale and use .ml as a tool for this ideological end in any way possible. If, eg, there is a way for a malicious instance to modify federated content from other instances and republish it, I would confidently say that the .ml devs certainly have the ability, and have shown a willingness to engage in that kind of agitprop. At the very least I think we have to take this threat seriously.

      Furthermore, If .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor, federating with them is exposing your users to very significant risks, as it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation, and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users. They could very easily collect identifying information from a target, and then modify a web application to serve malware to that specific user, which they push to the top of that users feed in various ways.

      This is an aspect of the fediverse which generally makes me uncomfortable. Even if the core code is safe and audited, there is nothing stopping a malicious admin from running modified versions of the front end or forum code. Again, it would even be possible to only serve such malicious content to individual targets, and federating content with them provides an incredibly convenient threat surface for performing this kind of targeted analysis.

      The biggest thing stopping this kind of behavior would be "who the fuck would bother?" And the scale needed to provide cover for the operation. Who? Well, an admin who openly admits they are waging information warfare in the fediverse, that's who. Or perhaps a dev who appropriates the name of an infamous murdering zealot as a symbol for his "cause." How? Maybe via one of the largest and most visible instances on the fediverse?

      Of course, I have no evidence that this actually happens. It would be incredibly difficult to detect such targeted threats. But the whole combination of the way the admin and devs handle themselves, and the adversarial way they interact with the rest of the fediverse, just triggers all sorts of red flags in the secOps part of my lizard brain, and it bothers me that people don't seem to be taking these threats seriously.

      • I hear you. My perspective may be slightly different from yours because I have more faith in the devs. I believe them when they make statements about supporting privacy and open source. I understand that they have some extreme beliefs regarding political ideology, but I think it's unfair to use that as evidence that their ethics are compromised in other aspects. They certainly have an agenda, but they also ultimately have principles and I would be quite surprised if they committed such a betrayal.

        It's like the old adage about conservatives being pro-life right up until the baby is born. People compartmentalize their feelings on different issues and parts of their life, and I think that within the compartment of software development, the devs seem quite ethical. Within the compartment of sociopolitical theory, they have opinions that many would characterize as unethical. But I don't think the latter implies that the former is likely to be compromised.

        I'm not really well versed in software, so I can't offer much in terms of discussing potential vulnerabilities on that level. I'm glad that someone is worrying about it though.

        And that brings me to my second point, which is that the Lemmy userbase is chock full of techies, skeptics, and critical thinkers. Even if they did have some grand scheme to propagandize us, I just don't think it would work. It'd be similar to what's happening now, with people independently calling them out and then collectively dealing with the issue.

        The time when the Lemmy devs could hope to control the evolution of this platform is long past. They're outnumbered and there is a substantial negative sentiment about them amongst the userbase. I'm really not too worried about the harm they might cause. I'm more concerned about making a rash decision that creates more problems than it solves.

      • You raise some interesting points, and I don't think they should be dismissed out of hand. I have some questions though (some of them are re: your other comments here):

        [...] some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content.

        Could you speak to this in a little more detail? Does what you are seeing inherently require functionality beyond what Lemmy's public release offers natively, or is beyond the scope of something like an automod tool? Asked honestly, I am not an IT professional.

        [...] if .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor [...] it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users.

        This is obviously a very serious accusation, but let's put that aside for a moment.

        My (limited) understanding is that as a function of using the ActivityPub protocol, it is already trivial to collect identifying information on users of federated services. What makes lemmy.ml unique in this regard - couldn't a bad actor do this just as easily by other means? Simply it's comparative size to other instances/services that can be leveraged for this purpose? Aren't there lower profile means of accomplishing this same thing?

        I don't know enough about how federation works from a technical perspective to speak to feed manipulation when viewing a 'rogue actor' instance from a place like sh.itjust.works, but welcome comments/clarifying questions on this point from smarter people than myself. Want to know more, just don't know what to ask.

    • It's good to know that ml users aren't disproportionately causing problems. That was the impression that I got - they have their overzealous trolls with their own ideological spin but they don't have disproportionately more trolls than other instances - but I'm not a mod anywhere so I don't pay attention as closely.

      I think ml does have moderation issues, that post on the technology community is not the first time I've seen overly aggressive mod actions from them. I've left several news and politics communities on ml due to certain users and moderators creating an environment I prefer not to be in. Being a moderator is a hard job, but I genuinely appreciate the transparency and even-handedness from the mods in other large non-ml communities and they show that we can and should expect better from our community moderators.

      I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances, the politics communities already have active alternatives due to the mod issues. The Star Trek communities show this is totally possible, but the non-political communities are the least likely to have issues with overzealous moderators (unless you're foolish enough to engage in politics elsewhere over there and get a blanket ban from all of ml for bullshit reasons...). But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.

      I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we're all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn't be here without them.

      • It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems.

        Yeah, precisely. It's a very different situation compared to hexbear, who would flood threads on our server and deliberately try to rile up our users. The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.

        If you get banned from lemmy.ml in that situation, I feel like it's not a bad outcome. Just join the equivalent community somewhere else. Defederating them is almost the equivalent of banning yourself anyway, if you think about it.

        I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances [...].But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.

        I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.

        Very well said. I completely agree that it behooves us to move a good chunk of communities off lemmy.ml. I think I missed touching on that point in my original comment, thank you for expressing it so well.

    • Was hoping you'd chime in :)

      Just thinking out loud here, but question: Do you know if the current version of Lemmy allows for user-level importation of bulk community block lists (kinda like what you see for ad blockers)? I can't help but wonder if this is a middle-ground for folks who feel defederation is warranted on the basis of discourse, where the problem may actually lay primarily in specific communities based on the topic of interest.

      A group of interested parties could get together, review communities worth blocking based on whatever criteria they come up with, make the list available and users who are interested/aligned with the group's principles could apply it in one go. Saves the effort of having to engage and block on a case-by-case basis, or blocking whole instances if that feels like overkill.

      Not certain I'd use something like this, and it brings its own concerns for consideration, but it seems like a happy medium others could be interested in.

      • Was hoping you’d chime in :)

        You should know by now that I can't help myself, I like to hear the sound of my own voice 😅

        What you're talking about is really similar to gui.fediseer.com, except that's on an instance-wide basis. I think it's a really good idea and seems pretty simple to set up if it's not already possible.

        This particular situation is kind of rare, because typically you'd either want to block the whole instance or just a handful of problem communities. But since lemmy.ml has so many active communities, there are too many bad ones to block manually, and too many good ones to block the whole instance. So yeah, a sharable user-curated community block list would definitely be useful right about now.

  • Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it's much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don't think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.

    I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I'm starting to realize that basically every instance's and community's admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it's political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.

    I don't think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I'd like to buy time by mass-defederating them.

  • At minimum the .ml admins have shown a desire and willingness to keep their finger on the scale of the broader fediverse, which makes them a clear existential threat and possibly even a cyber security risk. In addition, they protect hexbear and lemmygrad, which openly state that their intention is to wage information warfare on the fediverse. We also see some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them some special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content. This alone is extremely concerning. The idea that we can individually block their instance does nothing to mitigate the ideological or security concerns I have.

    My personal experience is that they protect propagandists and do not enforce their own rules evenly at all. My bans have been for me extremely petty things, and even for thing I have said on other instances. Meanwhile I have been called names, told that my family deserves to be tortured and that my country deserves to be nuked by .ml users (or hexbear proxies). I also find their defense of Russian and Chinese autocracy personally offensive, as I have family who have been directly impacted by both. It would be one thing if this was happening in a forum where these issues could be debated, or defenses mounted against misinformation and historical revisionism, but that is simply not the case. Even the most modest pushback against these ideas results in quick bans. This is not something we should associate with.

  • Hello,

    Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058

    Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762

    • Nope, totally reasonable to add this. I just didn't bother because it was the top post in All at the time (think it still is this morning).

  • Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn't the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.

  • I don't believe that defederation is necessary nor wise. The complaints about Lemmy.ml that I've seen have generally revolved around how they moderate their instance and how communities they host are moderated. If one doesn't like how they moderate their communities, then one should be the change that they wish to see — start a replacement community, nurture it, and try to make it better than what was seen on lemmy.ml. This is the beauty of the fediverse — you aren't forced to utilize anything on any other instance. And if one really dislikes seeing lemmy.ml users, then they can even block the instance themself. Lemmy.ml provides a steady, and considerable amount of traffic and content to the Lemmyverse. While that isn't an argument for continuing to use their communities, it is an argument for why it would be unwise to fragment the network by defederating from them.

    The only time that an instance should consider defederating from another, imo, is if it finds that users from other instances are violating the local rules at a rate higher than what is possible, or economically viable to handle via administrative action. It shouldn't be a simple matter of passive difference in opinion.

  • Lemmy.ml is the reason I don't even tell anyone I use the Fediverse, let alone recommend it.

    Even if they hadn't followed around an old account downvoting everything I posted (mostly memes) I'd support defederation.

    On the whole, they're not real leftists, let alone communists. It's a facade for them to spread disinformation.

    Lemmy.ml is a propaganda machine for a murderous, authoritarian government.

  • Personally, I blocked .ml already. Yes, they are a large instance with a lot of legitimate content, but theres such a disproportionate amount of extremism, hate and discrimination, and toxicity that I didn't find it worth being connected to.

  • I definitely think the problems lie with a certain set of individuals within the base, as opposed to the instance as a whole, but it’s a pretty sizable amount. It mostly comes off as a moderate annoyance to me, and not enough to warrant blocking the whole instance, much less defederation.

    I will say, however, that the problems seem to be becoming more prevalent. It’s a really annoying situation, as .ml has some of the more popular communities, including the largest meme community, and it would suck to lose those. But at the same time, I’m starting to get really tired of the auth-left bootlicking and one-sided moderation.

    It’s no hexbear, not by a long-shot, but it’s definitely becoming an issue.

  • I might be following the right communities, because I never noted problem with user from .ml.

    I start to wonder whether we don't have some person using tankie the same way as mainstream right-winger use woke.

  • Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I'd be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I'm against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.

    Late edit: after continuing to interact with their communities over the months, I now believe most everyone on Lemmy.ml instance is either braindead, or acting in bad faith. Their administration is biased, they'll remove any discussion they don't agree with as "misinformation", while their admins actively spread real misinformation and inflame division. Whatever community they've fostered is a negative for lemmy, at large.

    Defederate and leave them in an echo chamber to rot.

  • This was my only meaningful personal interaction with lemmy.ml that stands out. It was not a good experience. It became very clear, very fast that I would simply have no meaningful discussion with these people. So I left some downvotes on the awful comments promoting violence and stopped engaging.

    I haven’t blocked the instance or any users. But i am considering it.

  • First of all, lemmy.world admins do have history of overreacting (e.g. with piracy & shroom) . So I don't think we should base our decision on theirs.

    I have heard of lemmy.ml users being an issue at some point in the past, but it seem to have settled.

    I personally don't have any issue with lemmy.ml; maybe in the past, but I cannot seem to recall any. What I do know is there are active communities there (Linux comes in mind) and we'd lose all that if we defederate.

  • IMHO, some of their communities are sketchy, but as long as it's contained in their communities, that's easily manageable with just the user-level instance block feature.

    • Not for a new user who is not aware...

      It would be preferable if lemmy.ml were an opt-in feature rather than one that someone has to learn how to opt out of, on top of trying to figure everything else about the Fediverse at the same time.

      I am now strongly hesitant to recommend Lemmy to people irl bc of all the heavy mandatory curation that must be done before someone can have a pleasant experience. After accidentally responding to a comment in chapotraphouse, and another in lemmygrad.ml, I almost left the Fediverse entirely rather than put up with the barrage of many tens of responses that continued for weeks despite me not responding to them anymore, and I don't want people to associate that with me. i.e. it is a bad look for us all when the "we" includes "them", and it hurts our growth overall. I strongly believe they should have the freedom to be however they want... (even though they do not reciprocate that thought) but that doesn't mean that I want to help bring new people into their audience for their amusement.

      • Right, while it technically has a user-level solution, you're right that a brand new user would simply not know about any of this.
        I stumble upon a few now and then when they try and report stuff from there.
        So... something like autoblocking the instance on user creation... which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

        Thanks for your input

  • Hello! I'm a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of "why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!" And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.

    AMA, I guess!

    For some background about myself, I'm an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first "smart phone" (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.

    However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don't pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.

    Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the "tankie problem") was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a "lib" for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that "libs don't understand" that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism... but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.

    As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you'll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for "Rule 4," which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.

    You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.

    This is a long post... and I'm sorry. I guess I just really don't want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

    I'm sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.

    Edit: I'm also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I've studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I've gotten involved here.

    • I am not from this instance. But I’m very happy to have you on the federation we need more people willing to be open and honest about their experiences. Thank you 🙏

    • Edit: Added an additional choice - block whole instance at user level - to 'option' list. If you, nahuse, or anyone else have ideas for options f through zz, feel free to say so!

      Thanks for joining the discussion, nahuse! I appreciate the specifics you've provided.

      As an aside, you and a few others raise an interesting point re: archiving of deleted comments, particularly when there's evidence of those comments getting removed from the modlog intentionally (I'm not claiming that this is objectively true - I don't know, but it is one of the common claims in the broader discussion here and on similar posts). Seems like a worthwhile project for someone with the interest, skills, and time to develop. But anyway.

      Your experience does echo that of other politically engaged sh.it.heads* in this thread. I would ask - given the choice between
      a) blocking lemmy.ml communities with evidence of ideologically motivated moderation (either on a case by case basis, or as part of a community-sourced blocklist - something I mentioned here before but do not know can be implemented), and using alternatives for 'controversial' topics;
      b) blocking lemmy.ml at the instance level, as a user;
      c) joining an instance which is not federated with lemmy.ml;
      d) having sh.itjust.works defederate from lemmy.ml as a whole; or
      e) keeping things as they currently are, in terms of your engagement and 'positioning' [eg. Instance of choice, community engagement, etc.] - retaining the ability to try and engage on lemmy.ml communities with the same risk of ban/blanket ban, and talk about it there while enfranchised and elsewhere in the Threadiverse during ban periods.

      which makes the most sense to you/would be preferable?

      The dynamics of Lemmy instances are kind of interesting, as each can have very different approaches to moderation. An instance admin may simply have a policy of "Please just don't post anything that's going to make CSIS or the RCMP knock on my door" (Canada bias here), and individual community moderators either a) apply an even hand with that edict in mind, or b) apply and enforce more restrictive policies. Others may have a more consistent throughline based in interests, political beliefs, and so on - which seems to be the case for lemmy.ml and is why we see these blanket community bans over innocuous comments.

      I'd like to touch on that 'innocuous' point - what I've personally seen results in bans/deletion looks like fairly bog standard internet political discourse (alongside legitimately not cool stuff, but that's not in scope at the moment to tease out). You present a point, you get a counterpoint, things get a little heated - with the difference that the person with the heated 'not our flavour of far-left discourse' comment has a much higher risk of getting ban hammered.

      I don't think this is ok - but at the same time, this is a moderation choice of a specific group using a specifically allocated set of resources. Alternative communities exist, and can be used, that may not have this problem (though someone will always find something to complain about re: moderation practices, tale as old as the internet)

      There is, of course, the stickier point of lemmy.ml being not necessarily the main instance (see imaqtpie's post, makes some good points), but the Lemmy dev's instance. I don't think the problems people have with lemmy.ml (usually in global events and political discussion communities - unfortunately resulting in blanket bans from unrelated communities on the instance in some cases) extend to the tool/protocol itself [see: exploding-heads, all of the more distasteful instances that exist], but this may be a concern for some [see Socsa's comments here]. It may raise concerns/doubts about Lemmy as a whole. It sucks - I love this thing - but it shouldn't be unacknowledged.

      *If you haven't seen this term before, it's what I like to call users of this instance (much to the chagrin of some :) ). Think Deadheads - enthusiasts of sh.itjust.works. A little cheeky, but ultimately good natured and fun - which kind of sums up my feelings about this place. We love sh.it.heads - not to be confused with shitheads.

      • I too have been somewhat of an agitator in this. In my defense, data getting removed from the modlogs sounds indefensable to me - as in, incompatible with the principles of the Fediverse where we are supposed to "trust" the instances that are federated together?

        In Dessalines' defense, that may very well have been real yet merely a bug in testing the newer features of v0.19.4? Only an instance admin would be able to dig deeper into that, and even that requires some bit of coding or data wrangling skill to either constantly monitor the differences in the modlog before vs. after the alleged edits, or as was suggested to have happened, be caught purely by chance (as one person claimed).

        I am not volunteering to spin up an instance to test though, so I will drop this matter and give lemmyl.ml the benefit of the doubt on it. i.e., Lemmy.ml having been in the process of upgrading to 0.19.4-rc.6 wasn't widely known at the time, but now that we know that, bugs may be more expected than not during such a process?

        Even so it does not change how hearing about (or observing first-hand?) such heavy-handed moderation practices as nahuse described will drive people away from the Fediverse, thereby lowering overall content for us all. Saying that it is their instance to do with as they please is like saying that it is fine for porn to appear on porn websites - which it very much is! (or should be, imho) - but my goodness, please label it so that people do not walk into it unawares!?!?! Similarly I am not... entirely happy that hexbear.net has a community dedicated to dunking on people (Chapotraphouse; maybe it is therapy for them?), but now that I know that, let them feel free to be however they want, but oh my, please WARN someone before letting them just walk into that hailstorm of comments!!! (which continued for WEEKS after I made some comment about President Biden doing better than I expected in some small matter, long after I stopped responding but my consent to continuing the conversation no longer seemed to matter to them; and then the next week I similarly walked into a lemmygrad.ml post and had the same thing happen)

        The very concept of Federation makes that significantly more complicated b/c "we" choose to show that content in "our" spaces, so it is both theirs, and after it comes over, ours too. Fortunately, the site.content_warning in v0.19.4 will allow such warnings to be delivered, though I am not certain how it is implemented (it says prior to showing images or viewing a community, but what about a post from a community? e.g. !memes@lemmy.ml has a great deal of content that can be... off-putting to people). Note that it says that the warning will only be delivered the first time a user triggers it - though again the details remain to be seen, e.g. will a cookie remember that past a session for the same login?

        So I personally would like to see an option "f" added that would use the new site.content_warning ability as/if it rolls out with v0.19.4. Though I have no say in this as a non-member of sh.itjust.works, so I say this only to explain my thoughts in case they were of interest. The tricky part about that might be how to implement it: the temptation would be to do so only in the more "controversial" communities, and yet the admins of lemmy.ml are doing blanket bans among many communities, e.g. !memes@lemmy.ml, despite people never having commented in them before. So they seem to think that the entire instance is one big community in that respect - or else how can that be justified? - hence the warning should be to anywhere across all of the instance, not just each community, should it not? (and again, whether that is even possible, or if it would have to be applied to each individual community plus all future ones created, remains to be seen)

    • I guess I just really don't want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

      I don't mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they're well within their right (ethically I mean, they're within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)

  • When I found about the existence of Lemmy, I wanted to create an account, and found that Lemmy.ml is the official Lemmy instance ran by the Lemmy developers (who I knew nothing about). Seemed like the obvious, default, non-controversial choice.

    Of course I later learned about... All this. I'm not interested in any political content so it took me a while.

    So I guess I'd be a casualty, due to picking the biggest instance suggested to me by join-lemmy.org. How is someone new to Lemmy supposed to have the context here?

  • I'm against defederartion, but I also actively avoid their communities.

    I don't think the problem is with a majority of users, just a handful, but many in that handful are mods. As an anecdote, I got temp banned from a community there because somehow our discussion shifted to Russia, despite the topic having nothing to do with it, and the mod banned me for "anti-Russia" something or other (nothing I said seemed to violate community or instance rules), but I think the real reason was me challenging that user's authority.

    I've also noticed a lot of downvotes for well-cited but "against the left" comments, and the responses I get are often low-effort.

    I've also had some decent discussion there as well. I've challenged people's views and had good reubuttals, so it's really not all bad. I'm guessing it's a fraction of very active users that cause a lot of the issues.

    So I'm against defederation, but I also recommend avoiding their communities. It seems to be a strong echo chamber, but those who aren't interested in that do seem to branch out. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

  • I am generally against defederation. The way I see it .ml has problems with how their instance and communities are run and moderated. Unless there is content that puts sh.itjust.works in legal jeopardy I don't think defederation will solve a fundamental discourse problem.

    Honestly I don't want to see .ml users unable to interact with our communities where they are subject to local rules. It is a foundation of the fediverse and the discourse it enables to avoid defederation.

    I don't see instance issues with .ml: just user issues. Users and communities everywhere can exercise their own discretion with bans and blocks. This isn't a defederation issue as I see it.

  • I'm going to echo what seems to be the majority opinion here and say that defederation should not be taken lightly. The last big defed discussion here I was in favor of, but that was a very different case. That was a hatespeech instance with the barest veneer of "just asking questions bro", run by a free speech absolutist who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Their daily posts consisted mostly of transphobic, islamophobic or anti-semitic rage-bait (or some combination of those). EDIT: Oh! There were also a lot of covid conspiracy posts there too, now I think about it.

    There are some communities there I avoid, but that doesn't merit defederation. In my mind at least, that should be reserved for instances that allow illegal content, pure unadulterated hatespeech, instances that have been overrun by bots so badly the admin can't handle it (temporarily for that one ofc), or instances that regularly brigade and the admin encourages this behavior.

    And besides, I've also had some pleasant and interesting conversations with .ml users. There are some problematic users and communities, but that's why we have block buttons.

  • I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It's lemmy. There's a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn't be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I've been on .ml for a while, and while I don't comment in political threads, generally, I've seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they've seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems...normal....banal even? There's a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying "well, their political communities are terrible" is all well and good if that's your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

    Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that's up to them. And that's what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I've seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

    I suppose it's probably a natural course of events that you'll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It'll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

    But part of what's great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.

  • Checking the mod logs often finds an on topic 'right wing' post getting deleted by their mods. As such I block everything news or politics related from there. I block non politics and news when I can find a community on a different instance to serve.

  • I'm more bothered by anti-tankie posts then tankie posts.

  • Fairly early on, when discussing defederating with an instance called "exploding heads", I laid out criteria I would consider worthy of defederation, which you can find here

    I was primarily concerned with unwanted traffic going out over the rest of the Fediverse, hosting illegal content like child porn, or being a rampant hive of racism and calls to violence.

    So far I've basically heard people accuse Lemmy.ml of being rather Chinese in their moderation in-house. Is that all we've got?

    • So far, that's it in a nutshell - barring one account of potential cybersecurity risks coming out of that, which still makes some assumptions re: motivations I'm not 100% convinced on.

      I think there's people on the 'perhaps defed' side who would want to argue it on points 4 from your immediate defed list, or 1 on the call to vote list - but personally, I'm not convinced the evidence is strong enough to do so compellingly.

      Regardless of the current discussion, it'd be wise for us to revisit your proposed policy as a group and see if we can make that official (with any relevant revisions from pre-vote scrutiny). I stand by what I said back then - it's a solid list, and IMO worth being made official and saved somewhere broadly visible for later reference.

      • Because if the complaint is "They ban you over there for failing an ideological purity test" the solution is we have our own Lemmy instance, start or participate in an equivalent community here.

      • Another large instance deleted some of my posts and hid it, I think it's more common than most understand.

        I also think this post has been good at calling attention to them and that it might not be good to post there if you care about your stuff being moderated. They don't seem to be outwardly malicious, just closed and authoritarian on how they run their instance.

  • I don't understand the point of posts like this. How about you make up your own opinion and tell us why we should agree with it? I don't care what a bunch of random strangers think based on their random feelings. " How do we feel about...." posts are pure trash.

    • Hey Pfeffy - welcome to the Agora.

      Mostly because I'm curious about what strangers think - particularly on fediverse topics. If you haven't been on this community before, I invite you to take a look at some of the older posts.

      A lot of this current lemmy.ml chatter rings super closely to shit we've debated here before, and given that this instance just hit its one year anniversary I think it's interesting to see history repeat itself.

      If you're not into it though, totally cool - no hate here!

    • This is just the community in which we have discussions and votes about how to manage this instance.

  • I had an account on there.

    Russia invaded Ukraina.

    Russia used their non-nuclear city-massacring weapon their "heavy flame thrower" on a city..

    Russia murdered Mariopol..

    etc..

    Recently there was an election in Russia, & I commented that if what Putin wants is for the war to calm-down for his political-comfort in the election,

    then Ukraina had to MAKE it a political-problem for Putin

    ( obviously, the more politically-problematic it is for Putin, the more likely this stupid waste-of-life will be ended for internal-political reasons ).

    Lemmy.ml banned me for life.

    Kremlin-aligned people are doing what they can to butcher civil-rights throughout the West.

    Lemmy.ml apparently is aligned with the Kremlin.

    I'm not for accommodating true-enemy of our countries.

    Remapping it from sociopolitical-frame to internal-to-one's-body..

    IF rabies were trying to highjack your biology, would "being nice to the rabies-viruses" help your life?

    Would it increase your lifespan?

    Sometimes one needs to accept that some people really, actually intend that one's kind be butchered, for their ideology, or some other aspect of their personality/religion.

    Young people are generally much less capable of actually-accepting/actually-believing that others aren't motivated by wanting to be liked..

    Young people are generally much less capable of accepting that there are many who'd rather see one butchered/destroyed for sake of their factional-supremacism, for sake of their ideology, for sake of their money, for sake of their class-position, whatever..

    Old people sometimes become capable of accepting the evidence.

    It seems to be both life-experience battering it into one AND one's innate-nature ( if either one is defective for accepting the specific understanding, then it just won't get in. And I'm saying that as a guy who took about 1/2 century to learn the meaning. )

    Understand that people who push to displace objectivity for sake of their ideology are, on both right & left, working to make-certain that this century gets "settled" through lashing-out with weapons, until factional-supremacism, of whomever "wins", has vanquished considered-reasoning, objectivity, correctness, sanity, responsibility, accountability, all that are required for civil-rights to be.

    The amount of dogwhistle-programming going on, now even in mainstream left media ( CNN, MSNBC, "progressive" memes are getting infected with it significantly, nowadays )..

    as ClimatePunctuation continues accelerating through the next few decades, it'll just keep intensifying..

    We NEED to reduce the amount of ideology-instead-of-considered-reasoning.

    They're not only going the opposite way, they're pushing that that be The Answer, just as the right are doing.

    shruggeth

    What people do is people's own business.

    Humankind's enforcing the 6th Great Extinction, & pretending it isn't, it's successfully activated ClimatePunctuation, which is accelerating, & will continue accelerating for decades, before peaking, then slowing-down to the new ClimateEquilibrium ( hot planet ), & .. pretending it isn't..

    non-accountability/non-responsibility/denial/ignoring is going to enforce the extermination of most of humankind, this century..

    The "infection"/highjacking of the US is what happens when corruption is accommodated, right?

    a "post constitutional" US of A, is what they're working-on enforcing, now, when they take possession of the US..

    Notice, finally, that Leninism, with its "proletariat dictatorship" & Murdochism/Fox with its "populist dictatorship" are actually equally opposed to considered correct reasoning being normal, or owning authority.. both oppose correct-education for all, preferring propaganda/brainwashing ( Leninism through "education", Murdochism through TV & biblical "education" ).

    Accommodate it if you want, or hard-block it if you want.

    I'm not claiming a "vote".

    it is my opinion that they ought be defederated, hard, absolutely, by all who value civil-rights, just as all who are machiavellian/gaslighting ought be locked-out.

    but I'm not claiming any binding-vote, of any kind, in any community.

    _ /\ _

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